There has been a lot of talk over the summer in Ottawa about a “charm offensive” coming this autumn, in which the prime minister will polish up his people skills and win back some of the public trust he has lost since the 2011 election.

Indeed, by early August, there were signs of a kinder, gentler Stephen Harper in the softened rhetoric on the Northern Gateway Pipeline. His natural resources minister seemed to be less inclined to fight a jihad against environmental groups. Then again, the government could have been giving itself some wiggle room in case the Gateway project tanks – something now looking more likely.

But there were also signs of business as usual with the Tories. Harper effectively has told the premiers he can’t stand being in the same room with them. And Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had the audacity to name Etobicoke Centre MP Ted Opitz as one of Canada’s observers in Ukraine’s elections – before the Supreme Court issued its ruling on whether 2011 election results in his riding should stand.

So, we may be speculating whether there will be a charm offensive this fall. This government likes to keep people guessing about its intentions.

The Harper government also has no problem living with contradictions. This administration is interventionist on some things, such as financial regulation, but laissez-faire about other things, such as the environment or gun control.

The Conservatives may be down by almost 10 points in the polls since May 2011. Harper’s approval rating may be half what it was when he won his majority government. And the NDP is ahead in most polls.

The governing party shouldn’t be panicking yet. Harper is still the country’s most trusted political leader. And much of the NDP’s strength in the polls can be attributed to the traditional bounce that follows a party’s leadership contest.

But, most important, voters are deeply concerned about the economy – and the Harper government owns this issue. Until one of the Opposition parties has a comprehensive, and believable, economic policy, the Conservatives need not panic.

Still, they might want to look at some case studies in the private sector, such as Research in Motion Ltd., in which cracks went unfixed during the good years.

Or the Tories might want to look at where the Mulroney government found itself at the end of the summer of 1989. Back then, the NDP had just lost its popular leader, Ed Broadbent, and the Liberals were in a nasty civil war that would eventually push out John Turner as leader. The former Progressive Conservatives were looking like they would be in power for some time.

And, more recently than that, the Liberals had thought they would be running the country for many years because of a fractured Opposition and a prime minister who seemed to be coated in Teflon as he continued with his “little guy from Shawinigan” shtick. But cracks in the Liberals’ support base became crevices by 2006.

One of the smarter things the Liberals did after they assumed power in the early 1990s was to introduce yearly pre-budget hearings at the Commons finance committee every autumn, mindful as they were that business groups felt disenfranchised on economic policy during the Trudeau years. As a result, every business and interest group was invited to submit a brief by the end of August on what they wanted to see in the next federal budget.

Sadly, the current governing party seems bent on stamping out this outbreak of participatory democracy. The office of the committee’s Conservative chairman, James Rajotte, announced during the doldrums of early July that briefs would no longer be accepted before this year’s hearings. Instead, interested Canadians are free to submit answers (limit of 330 words each, please) to half a dozen broad questions on the economy that could be found on the committee’s web site. The deadline for those answers was the Friday before the August long weekend.

The rationale from Rajotte was that the committee was being buried in briefs from Canadians. A survey by stealth in the dead of summer ought to stamp out this type of pesky democracy.

This might sound like a very tiny crack. But what happens if Canadians eventually decide this government is not listening on the economy? IE

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